Charles Hartshorne

Charles Hartshorne was the foremost philosopher of religion of the twentieth century and the principal architect of process theology. Building on Whitehead's metaphysics, he developed a "neoclassical" conception of God as a being who changes and grows in response to the world — a God who genuinely experiences the universe rather than standing outside it as an unmoved mover.

Hartshorne revived and reformulated the ontological argument for God's existence, arguing in The Logic of Perfection that a perfect being must exist necessarily. He taught that classical theism's insistence on divine immutability made God less, not more, than the greatest conceivable being. His vision of a God who genuinely loves and responds to creation influenced a generation of theologians and remains central to open and relational theologies.